Re: non-free firmware: driver in main or contrib?
"Marco d'Itri" <md@Linux.IT> writes:
> lewis@catbox.co.uk wrote:
>
>>>>Of course, there's shades of gray, here. If all the driver does is emit
>>>>a message CAN'T FIND NON-FREE FIRMWARE, ABORTING without the firmware,
>>>>it's hard to say that it doesn't depend on the firmware. But if the
>>> This applies to almost every driver in the Linux kernel.
>>Less than 14% of the driver source files in 2.4.26 even mention the word
>>'firmware'. Hardly 'almost every driver'.
> You obviously missed the point. Almost every driver talks to a device
> which needs some kind of firmware, but you obviously noticed the ones
> which do not have it on a non-volatile medium.
> Why should debian adopt a different policy if the vendor provides this
> firmware on a CD instead of on a flash EEPROM chip?
Because of the reasonable expectation that the user already has the
EEPROM chip, and it's part of the hardware. It's not something Debian
could ship or will.
-Brian
--
Brian Sniffen bts@alum.mit.edu
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